This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Friday, March 13, 2009

The American Dream is a Fairy Tale!

Today I have to put a long-term project aside to write a blog. It’s been simmering for a while, but when I saw a retired physician offering a year’s worth of medical care free, while potential retirees try to prolong their time in the shrinking job market, that did it.

What’s my gripe? CNN (for better or worse, my bell weather cable news channel), continues to play the human interest angle while offering zero substantive analysis. This is not to belittle Ali Velshi and his financial colleagues, who do an excellent job within the confines of the all-American principle of objectivity. The problem is, so-called objectivity (for there really is no such animal) edges out ideological - or even scientific - analysis every time.

Yesterday when I turned the tv back on at five o‘clock my dial was still tuned to Drexel University’s local channel on which I’d listened to Democracy Now over lunch. They were broadcasting a labor union meeting that took place a while back in the state of Washington. In contrast to the blow by blow account of the ways business harasses employees who try to set up a union, one speaker showed a recent Paris street scene, filled as far as the eye could see with protesters carrying huge banners and signs. The audience immediately erupted in cheers. In five minutes, that program showed what people in other countries do routinely to defend their rights, and why we can’t do the same thing in the United States. When pictures of workers demonstrating in other countries appear on the corporate news channels, the dismissive tone of the anchor reinforces the message: we don’t do that here: we use the ballot box to achieve the American Dream. Indeed we do go to the polls, and we have costly campaigns, but the reason why Americans can only dream of the good life is that the media has folded these tools into one gigantic fairy tale, which goes like this: “Ideology is a false God that leads to mob rule, which is the opposite of democracy. We are a democratic country of laws, therefore AIG cannot break its bonus contracts, but workers can be forced to renegotiate contracts when things go south for the companies they work, for because without employers people couldn’t earn a living.” Now back to the retired doctor who admits that he can afford to treat people for nothing because he was paid for many years. That is the clearest illustration of the fact that medical charges (the ones your insurance pays if you are lucky), have no relation to overhead, education, or a fair salary for a day’s work: medical costs are inflated by the insurance companies as part of a general trend in this country (which led to the present world financial crisis), to base everything on the requirements of the financial sector, whose activities now dwarf those of all other sectors combined. People are not only encouraged to purchase everything they need on credit, which is bad enough, companies and individuals are encouraged to borrow money where once it was considered normal to save. To be more specific: if you have a small business, your bank will lend you money so that you can advertise (the cost of which will inflate the price you charge for your project). It will advance you money for payroll, which you will repay with interest when money comes in, interest which will be added to the price you charge your customers for your service or product. Worse, it will encourage you to adopt this modus operandi, making you believe it entails no risks and can go on forever. But in the real world fairy tales don’t goon forever, or have happy endings. If you extrapolate this very real description of the way things work in this country now to the provision of health care, you get doctors who start by charging you $160 to tell him what your problem is, them $500 more for an examination that takes five minutes using a device that has long been amortized. He can do this because the insurance company that will - if you are lucky - pick up the tab, is part and parcel of a larger entity called “the financial sector” which has replaced the growing of food and the production of things as the major economic sector. So that when President Obama says he cannot fix the economy until he fixes health care, he’s right. But he will not only have to computerize records: he will need to persuade the entire country to do business differently. The good news is that if he did that, the rest of the world would applaud him. The bad news is that it’s not likely to happen, because our political system has for so long been based on a fairy tale (you elect representatives who live on their salaries and make dispassionate decisions for the good of the greatest number). Only when CNN gives a seminar on utilitarianism, or interdependence, or the history of government involvement in our economic system, will Americans be able to stop dreaming and start living.

7 comments:

Ooh oops i just wrote a long comment and as soon as i hit reply it came up blank! Please please tell me it worked right? I dont want to sumit it again if i dont have to! Either the blog glitced out or i am an idiot, the second option doesnt surprise me lol.

Welcome to Otherjones!

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’ may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

This blog aims to prepare readers in ways more important than stockpiling food and bandages for whatever happens, as we transition from an American century to a world century, helping them see through the web of lies with which we are being controlled.

Having lived for years at a time in half a dozen ‘foreign’, countries — learning their languages and histories — I have a unique ability to identify events that bear watching. That life, however, could not provide ‘retirement benefits’, so if you appreciate the unique combination of information and insight that characterizes my work, I hope you will integrate a small donation to Otherjones into your budget.

By clicking on the Donate button, you will be able to contribute via Paypal or your credti card. Thanks!

Follow by Email

My Latest Book: Russia's Americans

If you’re not quite prepared to believe that the US should go to war with Russia, or even that its President, Vladimir Putin, is a thug — or even if you simply believe that they mean the US harm, check out my new book Russia’s Americans, at Amazon. You will discover that there are many things you do not know about the Russia story, including the fact that thousands of Americans have chosen to live and work there. It is available in both paperback, at $22.25 and e-book, and is illustrated with many color photographs from my May 2017 trip.

About Me

Born in Philadelphia, I studied in Paris, became a French citizen by marriage, debuted at Agence France Presse in Rome, then, as Deena Boyer, followed Fellini’s creative process for The Two Hundred Days of ’81/2’. The proceeds from this book enabled me travel to Cuba to to interview Fidel Castro for a major French weekly, meeting with him again a week after the Kennedy assassination and several times in 1964 for a book, Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young, in which the other members of the government (including Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Celia Sanchez), tell in their own words why they made the revolution. My Cuba archive is on-line at Duke University.

In the seventies, I did graduate work in Global Survival, taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a speech writer in the Carter State Department, publishing an article on U.S.-Soviet relations in the in-house journal in 1976.

Returning to Paris in 1981, with assistance from the Centre National du Livre, I published Une autre Europe, un autre Monde, the only book that foresaw the reunification of Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. I returned to Philadel-phia in 2000, and have been a contributor and senior editor at various on-line journals.

A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness hopes to change the way both seekers and skeptics look at good and evil - -and at the daunting problems of the 21st century. It shows that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as confirmed by modern science, is. It does this by viewing the world as a system and exploring what that means for the role of politics.

America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World is a primer for Americans and others who find the policies of successive US governments difficult to square with their image of the country and its founding documents. The decades I spent living on both sides of the Iron Curtain provided me with a unique awareness of America’s image abroad and of the mainstream media’s failure to convey news and ideas to the voters in whose name policies are carried out. References to work by other political writers illustrate little-known or forgotten features of American history that have contributed to the tragic face the country presents today.

Cuba 1964 provides the definitive answer to the question: “Was Fidel Castro a Communist before he carried out the revolution, or did he become one because of the way the United States reacted when he ousted pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista? While following day by day events, I had extensive conversations with the men and women who had joined the Castro brothers as early as 1953 and were now members of the revolutionary government. Together with Fidel, Raul, Che and Celia Sanchez, they told me in their own words why and now they made the Revolution hat continues to inspire countries in Latin America and around the world. The text is illustrated with photographs from my black and white archive which can be seen on-line at Duke University.

Lunch with Fellini Dinner with Fidel: How did it happen that a fourteen year old American girl found herself living among the French in post-war Paris? The answer to that question also explains why I went on to live in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, becoming mutti-lingual, writing first about the cinema, then about ‘the big picture’ while raising two children, mostly on my own. A religious grandmother and a hedonistic lover accompanied me on a journal which has been both spiritual and political, and is illustrated by many photographs from my personal album.